Microsoft Drops ‘Aero Glass’ User Interface in Windows 8

Microsoft Drops ‘Aero Glass’ User Interface in Windows 8

By Alexandra Chang

Fans of Microsoft’s Aero desktop experience will have to prepare for a life without translucent windows in Windows 8. Buried deep within a novel-length blog post, the company announced on Friday that it’s killing the Aero UI in the final release of Windows 8.

Microsoft first shipped Aero Glass when it launched Microsoft Vista in 2006. It featured a glass-like design for window borders, taskbars, and other surfaces in the OS. According to Microsoft, Aero was designed to make the Windows experience more visually appealing, while also drawing user attention to the content within a window or program.

But now, according to Jensen Harris, the Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience, the Aero look is outdated.

“This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now, but at the time, it was very much en vogue,” Harris writes in the blog post titled ‘Creating the Windows 8 User Experience.’

The Windows 8 team will replace the Aero UI with what it describes as a “clean and crisp” look more in line with its new tile-based Metro UI. In Windows 8, interface windows will no longer feature reflections or shadows. What’s more, corners will be squared off, and surfaces will look flatter. Users will get white as the default windows color, for a “modern” aesthetic.

Read more HERE
 
But now, according to Jensen Harris, the Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience, the Aero look is outdated.

“This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now, but at the time, it was very much en vogue,” Harris writes in the blog post titled ‘Creating the Windows 8 User Experience.’

And now for the version filtered through the thoughts of GMan:

"Aero was a great invention that we made, but we have other reasons to take it away now. So we are just going to try to play fashion authority while saying what's in and what's out, and make pretend it is no longer any good. This way, we can get a lot of people to believe it too and then it will be easier for us to justify this poor decision."
 

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Not surprised.

What a silly thing to do.
 

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If the date was April 1st I'd just :roflmao:but since it isn't I'm just going to :rolleyes: .
 

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I'm getting more and more convinced that Apple are drugging the water supply to MSFT HQ.

Amongst other things! They are definitely going quite mad there, it must be either 'shrooms' or LSD.....
 

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It also feels like they had this move planned and now have only introduced it in the spirit of "a little at a time".

If it had been done in the same build (CP) where choice was taken away to disable Metro or not, the voices in opposition would be even louder.

Or maybe they just decided this recently instead, but I don't think so.
 

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I agree. Aero wasn't bad exactly. It was not as well executed as it could have been but metro or the metro user interface they have created for the desktop isn't well executed either. It is definitely cheesy and outdated but not because the effects are cheesy it's because Microsoft never did a good job executing the effects. Simulating faux-realistic materials was never cheesy and I doubt it will ever be because you need SOME effects to make a button look like a button. It was always about how well you can execute something to be timeless just like a well done piece of clothing will never be OUT of fashion. So if their user interface is cheesy now it's because they did a bad job with their own design of Aero and on that I do agree they didn't design Aero that well.
 

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Not to mention they officially dissed their own product which they will still be supporting for many, many years to come: Windows 7 and to a lesser extent, also Vista.

What company says to the public?: "Our products are outdated, but thanks for buying them anyway, while you did."

Wow.
 

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Why is that Microsoft seems determined to eliminate features that most people like! First they eliminate the start button and now aero. What will they eliminate next? :(
 

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It's clear to me...the brass at MS are quite insane. They are seemingly deliberately trying to destroy what made them a success in the first place.

It's strange, lately at various companies I have noticed what almost seems like a deliberate "agenda" to to destroy them from within, noticed this with HP and the debacle with the old CEO, but that is just one other immediate example I can think of right now.

This seems like it is a bigger agenda. Am I nuts, or is something very strange going on at many major companies in the past several years???
 

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It's clear to me...the brass at MS are quite insane. They are seemingly deliberately trying to destroy what made them a success in the first place.

It's strange, lately at various companies I have noticed what almost seems like a deliberate "agenda" to to destroy them from within, noticed this with HP and the debacle with the old CEO, but that is just one other immediate example I can think of right now.

This seems like it is a bigger agenda. Am I nuts, or is something very strange going on at many major companies in the past several years???

This is only a computing website and not all other sorts of discussion <<< I suppose is a way to say it.

I can get very detailed in my thoughts along the lines of what you are saying. Instead of saying stuff that most here will not understand or worse, not want to believe, I'll simply say I agree with you.

For clues on what I mean, one can research what happened to Gibson Guitars within the last year. Then just give some solid thought to the hows and whys.
 

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Not to mention they officially dissed their own product which they will still be supporting for many, many years to come: Windows 7 and to a lesser extent, also Vista.

What company says to the public?: "Our products are outdated, but thanks for buying them anyway, while you did."

Wow.

apple does that ALL the time. "The best iphone ever." One year later, "The best iphone ever."
 

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apple does that ALL the time. "The best iphone ever." One year later, "The best iphone ever."

lol true but at least it's not "The best iPhone ever and the old one is so outdated."
 

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I think this is good, I was getting annoyed at the fact that the metro design of the Start Screen was clashing too much with the Aero design of the Desktop. Aero isn't gone for good as far as we know, the Taskbar is still translucent.

This is going to be a concept that takes a bit to understand....

An LCD screen is digital, and only displays 2D images with 3D gradients and effects to make things "pop." Why? We lived without it since 1985 until vista perfectly fine. Before then, we were more focused on what the operating system itself could do, how secure it was, how well it performed, how better it was to navigate through files, how better it was to find what we need faster. It wasn't so much about asthetics than anything until xp and it's truly cheesy looking UI. Sure, Aero looks pretty, I've even stared at the Windows 7 Desktop and admired its prettiness on the look of the glass effect, but that's the point I'm trying to make. We're starting to be more concerned with astethics of how well fake materials can be rendered and not so much what its potential really is.

Metro does look nice and I will concede that I've admired its cleanness in design. But metro does something else, it goes back to square one, where we were taken aback at what our operating system could do, not so much on how well it could render glass effects or blecky plasticky material. Metro is about something else, it's about being digitally authentic. It's about putting the content your truly care about, whether it be a favorite picture or a news feed or an Excel spreadsheet. The chrome is put on the back burner in this. The chrome isn't important. It's about simplicity in design. Sure, it may be called dumbed down and the designers put no effort into it, but why must it be complicated to use? Realisitically, most people probably don't even know how to do some advanced things in Windows, heck, I bet no one knows that Windows 7 has a built in virtual private network client.

I just thought of this, if you look at Aero design, it really stemmed all the way back in 2003 with Longhorn. That's almost 10 years of a UI design scheme. But, if you want to look at metro design, that stems WAY, WAY back with the development of Windows 2000, Xp, and Longhorn. We'd be living in a different world if Microsoft made the push for that design during those days.
 

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Why don't they just make a non-Aero mode or theme rather than taking off the Aero so that people will have a choice and with less complaints?

The flat design on Windows 8 will use a bit less resources than Aero because transparency is eliminated but that's not significant with today's computers unless you're using a less powerful smartphone or tablet which M$ is targeting on the market right now.


The Aero wouldn't be appealing to me on a smartphone or a tablet but desktops and laptops, I've always loved it since Vista. Its almost as if MS is trying to put people away from desktops by removing the "feel" of the desktop and making it more of a phone or tablet feel. They are just not fair to desktop users and they are turning away from their bread and butter in the first place which is the Desktop.
 

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Yes, why indeed.

MS don't seem to have any interest in giving their customers choices any more.

It could be the end for them.
 

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I believe windows 8 will drive non-corporate users away from windows.
 

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This is disappointing, looks like they are building a tablet only OS, for the RT this would be understandable.

So the 'No compromise' is for the design engineers and not the consumer, think they got it backwards.
Definitely Apple in their water.
 

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